by Kim Wedlock
He rose in anger, biting off a snarl. He understood that so very well, but they could have turned the tide, if... He grunted. 'If they could be trusted.' He turned hopelessly to the window, but hesitated in shock at the sight of the frost that clung to every roof, wall, tree and road like a thin film of silver. 'It's reached...this far...? What does this mean?' He pondered it for only a moment before recoiling from the dizzying consequences. "What happened to the trackers? In the Pass? What happened to them?"
"A number were killed by tribes. The earth and water on either side launched fresh raids on one another and the phidipans were caught in the crossfire."
Salus whipped back towards him. "All of them?!"
"Many, but not all."
"Then why didn't the rest do anything about this?!"
"About the tribes or Kalokh?"
"Either!" He squeezed his fists against the shake of his hands and ripped the blanket from his burning shoulders. "We're too vulnerable - who else is going to storm in to take advantage of that? Skilan?! They're already occupying our eyes for what may or may not be their own impending march. We're being chipped away at from all sides! Doana, Kalokh, the tribes, non-humans - even Ivaea and Kasire have impeded us! How long until Antide or Dweron land on our shores?! Because it looks like every other war is turning our way!"
"Each of which you started."
"I am aware of that!"
Teagan fell silent. The room shook beneath his bellow, and for a long while all that could be heard was the keliceran's seething breath and the occasional shouts of dismay from the neighbouring nobles and their servants outside. Finally, his breath calmed. "War has worn them all down. Their numbers are thin, just as we planned. All of them. Doana are the only ones we need to contend with." He turned back to Teagan, who saw the whites of his eyes grow brighter as the darkness he'd been spared receded. "Kalokh will be dealt with. We need eyes back on Doana. Now that they've finally attacked, Moore will have no choice but to move on them. What else do you have?"
Teagan didn't ask how he'd known. "The papers have been decoded."
His grim face seemed to transform at his flash of hope. "And?" He was already hurrying back to the desk and began rifling through the piles spread over it, until Teagan stepped forwards and raised a single sheet. Salus fell perfectly still as his eyes landed upon it. They pulled back to him a long moment later. "I don't understand."
"It was all gibberish. This was the only thing it contained."
"Well, maybe the code was wrong after all. Maybe we need a different one..."
"No, sir, you misunderstand. It all translated. Into a children's story about a spider. We're picking it apart in case there's more to it, but this is all we've found that is...relevant."
His eyes dropped slowly back to the only four words on the page.
All hail Queen Yejide.
Chapter 49
The humming sensation was mild, but the foreboding Rathen felt creeping over him with it was enough to stall and whip him around on the spot. Eyila was beside him in an instant, and together they stared sharply back through the trees in fixated silence. The others noticed. Uneasily, they followed their gaze.
They saw it just before Aria could whisper the question. A low cloud of white dust rolled at speed over the grass towards them, stretching endlessly in both directions of the thin forest, leaving trees and bushes as steel in its wake. And it was immediately clear that it couldn't be outrun.
They braced themselves, some managed to draw weapons, and heartbeats later a terrible cold froze them in place. They puffed and gasped, fighting for breath as their chests tightened in shock, until Garon's own ragged voice assured them that they would breathe just fine once they relaxed.
Petra was the first to manage some kind of composure. "W-what was th-that?" She demanded as she hugged her shivering body and rubbed vigorously the sides of her chest, watching with dismay as the frosty cloud continued along through the trees, unhindered.
"Magic," Rathen replied gruffly. He was hurrying Aria's feet back into her shoes and removing her oversized cloak from her pack, bundling her up in it before fishing out his own. The others followed his lead as quickly as their comprehension would let them.
"What m-magic would d-do this?!"
"Clumsy magic."
"Salus." Garon growled. He drew his hood closer about his neck and searched furiously between the trees, fingers tightening about his sword.
"W-what reason c-could he have to do this?"
"I don't th-think it was intention-nal," Rathen said distractedly, pulling his own grey cloak tighter about himself and looking back through the frost, adjusting as quickly as he could to the cold. "It feels...familiar..." His dark eyebrows drew together. 'It feels like White Barrows. But how?'
He glanced towards Eyila. She didn't seem encumbered by it. And, he realised, neither was he.
Dissatisfied, he turned and started back along their heading, drawing Aria close and brushing past the others' disquieted looks. Eyila shortly followed, then the rest fell in tow, soothed if only a little by the two casters' resolution.
The clouds soon appeared through a break in the trees, and they were thicker and greyer than they'd been half an hour before. It had been threatening rain all afternoon, and now it looked distinctly worse.
Within another hour, it was snowing, and by nightfall the thin, white blanket that had settled reflected any and every surrounding light, exposing the landscape but rendering their fire equally less conspicuous. While it burned happily a ways behind him, their blankets set close by to warm, Rathen looked out from the treeline across the half-frozen river to the vast city on the hilltop. The three twisting towers loomed even from their great distance, their ebon facades appearing as polished steel in the snow, while the gold and silver spirals and braces glittered like the trim of the royal pennants.
He took a deep breath to subdue the racing of his heart. They would be inside those walls the next morning, if Owan's disturbingly simple plan worked out. But it wasn't the threat of capture or the Order's own intentions with him that weighed on his mind.
He heard footsteps approach behind him and locked his frets away.
"Will you have to cast anything tomorrow?"
Rathen shook his head. "Not if Owan comes through."
"Do you think it will work?"
Rathen breathed a laugh and cast Anthis a look torn between cynicism and faith. But he didn't answer. Uneasily, they looked back towards the towers and the flickering Midsummer lights.
Anthis shook his head in dismay. "Ironic, isn't it?"
"That's one word for it."
"Aria doesn't seem too disappointed, though."
"No," he smiled, "she doesn't. Her most memorable Midsummer yet, I should think."
The young man nodded in agreement. Rathen looked towards him when he failed to continue, and Anthis felt his gaze. He turned him a soft but doubtful look, which Rathen met directly, straightening in defence. He asked the question anyway. "Are you sure you want to bring her with us?"
Unsurprisingly, Rathen turned and stalked off back into the trees. "I'm sure I'm not letting her out of my sight."
He returned to the camp with a scowl on his face, but his darkness slipped when he found Aria kicking the snow by the fire, her face lowered and a great big pout on her lips. She seemed even smaller in her much too large cloak, and his first instinct was to scoop her up and squeeze her. Which he did.
She giggled, struggling to keep her pout in place. "I can't find Petra," she complained, fighting back her smile. "I wanted to practise with her."
"She's probably patrolling," he said, sitting himself on the driest rock in range of the fire, and lifting her onto his lap. "We're very close to Kulokhar."
She sighed dramatically. "I know." Her big blue-grey eyes lifted hopefully. "Can I see it?"
"You'll see it tomorrow, little one. I don't want you wandering off now, anyway. It's dangerous. Stay close to me." He spotted a fallen stick nearby and leaned o
ver to fetch it. When he presented it to her, however, she regarded it with disgust, shook her head, and scurried off a few trees away. She came back within moments, a shorter, thicker branch in her hands which she turned over thoughtfully as she walked, paused to take her knife from her pack, and settled back down beside her father, running the blade across it without a word.
He smiled and sat back against the boulder, pulling his cloak tighter about himself. He watched her for a while, and beneath her broken humming and the constant shunk-shunk-shunk of quick, confident strokes, he soon drifted off into thought. But when he found himself entrenched in the matter of the coming day, he forced his mental march around and wandered instead onto other matters, both trivial and grievous. Until those, too, morphed into issues he didn't have the strength to face.
By the time he returned to himself, roused by one of Eyila's grunts of frustration from across the camp, Aria had fallen asleep. Huddled in her cloak beside him, wood shavings all over her lap - as well as his own - and her knife forgotten on the ground.
He smiled softly and kissed the top of her curly hair, then found what remained of the branch poking out from her cloak's folds. She'd fashioned it into a crude horse's head - the beginnings of a hobby horse, he was sure, though one much too small for herself. But not, he mused, for a doll. He had no doubt that it would look perfect when she was finished. Her skill was freakish. He adored that. But even as he smiled, the corners of his lips pulled downwards in guilt. He leaned over her and reached carefully into her bag. He found it buried at the bottom. He was sure that wasn't an accident.
A sigh eased free as he turned it over in the firelight. The woman carved of the dark elm of home, cocooned in a lacing flower bud, its sepal leaves etched with mind-numbingly intricate symbols. Yes, her skill was freakish. And her dedication to her task was something else to be admired.
But they'd found the Zi'veyn. Her dedication had been for nothing.
That thought clamped around his heart like a vice.
As shame crept over him, he traced his fingers over the twisting lines of the bud, from base to tip and back again, and his tormented rumination stampeded away.
And then, quite suddenly, he had it. A flicker of a notion, an idea so small and so obvious it didn't even announce itself. A thought that had been there all along, standing in plain sight like a single bird within a flock, a tree within a forest, a pebble within a stream, revealing itself with an incidental clearing of its throat and changing his view of everything around him.
"What are you doing with that?"
His wide eyes snapped onto the girl. She was looking back at him with poorly concealed injury, her tone guarded. But he was still catching up with his spiralling calculations. Even so, he spoke loud enough for the others to hear. "I think I might have something."
Anthis and Eyila looked up from their paper, relief on the latter's face for the distraction, and Garon and Petra stepped in together from the trees. Rathen found himself suddenly pinned under their critical stares. He rose to his feet and addressed them carefully. "I'd already worked a few things out, but since Anthis's last discovery, I've been onto a little more. It's not enough, but it's something..."
Garon fixed him levelly. "How far from 'enough'?"
"...Potentially," he shifted as he said it, "it could affect a single, specified spell."
"That's not enough."
"Didn't I just say that?"
"What have you got?" Anthis asked before Garon could fire another unhelpful statement.
"I can't modify the Zi'veyn. I can't risk damaging it. But I can use the Zi'veyn's spell as a base for my own. I've figured that out to the point that I should be able to target and suspend a small amount, and I've also been working over the notes Vorik made--"
"Vuthal. Kruik Vuthal."
Rathen blinked. "Vuthal made regarding dissolving the magic. I'm making progress there, too, I just need to expand them to affect magic as a whole rather than one spell at a time." He laughed to himself, then, a brief, sardonic chuckle. 'It's the difference between pebbles and mountains.' He kept his doubt to himself. It wouldn't be his problem for much longer. "But combining them without degrading their individual strengths and purposes is a problem. I've been considering various methods of layering and merging, but in every case, one or the other looks likely to collapse. I've not tried casting them, but if it doesn't add up on paper, I can't risk applying it in practice."
"So you have half-finished spells and no way of combining them."
He let Garon's flat response slip by and, to their surprise, smiled instead. "No." He raised the wooden carving and tapped its base, the only point where the vined flower bud and the woman inside touched. "Connection. The spells don't need to be interwoven or cast one over the other. They just need to be connected. And while they both do different things, they have the same target, which means they only need to be connected at the start."
"Wouldn't it be easier to just take the Zi'veyn's targeting command and replace the suspension half with the command to 'dissolve'?"
"Yes. Would it not also be easier to kill suspected criminals on the spot rather than drag them away to the bailiff? Garon, if I start removing screws and nails when I don't know exactly what I'm doing, things are going to fall apart and nothing good will come of that. We've already seen for ourselves what half-formed elven magic is capable of. I'm trying to put together a spell beyond even the grand magister's capabilities using elven notes and the Zi'veyn as a framework. What I have is already a crude reproduction, but I have no intention of cutting things out, not until an elf tells me otherwise while I'm drunk off of my face."
"How much help do you think the Order could give you?" Petra asked hopefully. "Do you think you could have it finished before we leave?"
He stared through her for a moment before answering. "I think they could help the matter a great deal."
"But if you're using the Zi'veyn as a base spell, does that not mean that it'll be too big to cast?"
"For one person? Certainly."
Garon growled at the mage's lack of concern. "You want to recruit the Order to cast it, don't you? And what will happen when one of them takes the finished spell and--"
"Yes, yes, or," he held up the carving and smiled again. "Bit by bit."
They each blinked in sudden realisation. It seemed that he wasn't the only one to have overlooked that obvious detail.
A sudden squeal startled them, and Aria began bouncing up and down on the crunching snow, relief and excitement radiating from her like heat from the fire. But while the others grinned as she hopped madly around him, Rathen felt the awful shame and vice-like grip return. He didn't have the heart to tell her that he planned to hand it all over to the Order, especially not now that her carving would be put to use. Progress or not, they could complete it far more quickly than he, and they were in a much better position to cast it. No matter what Kienza had said, he doubted he could even light a torch without doubling over.
It was better for everyone that they took it off his hands. And since he'd already done most of the work for them, and planned it out as a human spell, they had no reason to refuse it aside from the deliberate bruising of a few scholars' egos. In fact, whoever could assemble it first would no doubt take all the credit and have a garish portrait hung in a tower corridor for their monumental achievement.
They were welcome to it. He wanted no further part in it, for himself or for Aria.
She jumped up at him, threw her arms about his waist and squeezed. He smiled and knelt, wrapping her up in his arms, and forced himself to smile. Tomorrow, this would all be over. And she - and the others - would be safe.
Few slept that night. Morning was painfully slow to come, and they broke camp before dawn. The snow had frozen through the night and remained strikingly reflective, and they made their way nervously by frost-light towards the capital city's walls, ducking behind rocks and beneath the riverbank to evade the sight of patrols along and below the battlement. But cover
was sparse, and with every quiet, stooping, slippery dash they made, they were more and more likely to be spotted. Only once they reached the shadow of the walls did any semblance of safety return, but so too did their risk equally double.
No one dared speak a word as they pressed themselves into the shadows, willing themselves to disappear into the stone. It was here, within sight of the East Road and Gate, that Owan had instructed them to wait, but whether he would appear, or a score of Rathen's hunters, weighed even upon his trustful mind.
Despite the hour, the night was not still; the faint smell of smoke and freshly hewn wood drifted over the top of the wall, and repetitive strikes of hammer against copper and steel could be heard a short distance beyond. They listened to it, tuned into it, and worried silently that they wouldn't hear the toll of the bell tower over it, and that the sign they awaited would drift by unnoticed. But among their fret, they stopped hearing the rhythmic clamour, and after an age, three great chimes finally rang through the chill air, very loud and very clear.
They roused themselves to attention and began watching the sky, worrying now that they would miss the sign over the final flits of nightlarks. But before that concern could burrow too deep, another and far more real problem moved into sight along the road, sending panic jolting through their hearts.
A platoon of thirty of Turunda's soldiers marched in formation towards the East Gate, clad in glinting silver armour behind their lieutenant's silent lead, an emerald pennant flowing proudly upon his spear.
The group fell perfectly still until Garon made the call to slip further back. But Rathen stilled them. He watched the approaching men closely, and spotted a single bird dancing in the air close above them, a nightlark itself, but with a tail too long for a female and too short for a male. It was a thoroughly uninteresting example of its species. But despite the certainty that set in place, he reached out towards it gingerly. Only then did he relax and nod. "That's our sign."
He moved out towards a rock to arc through cover towards them, leaving the others at the wall behind him in a panic. Eyila was the first to follow, then Aria, and the rest were left with no choice.
